Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion Is Shinier

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We’ve not heard much about the Sins of a Solar Empire expandalone/quasi sequel Rebellion since it appeared on the radar back in March. Today though Stardock sent over a couple of images (below) showing how the graphical overhaul will shiny-up the ships from the original game to give the new game a good dose of polish. And they are at least 25% shinier, according to my Pixelshaderised shinometer. Of course Sins of a Solar Empire has been expanding and overhauling aplenty (and with stuff that matters to the game) since the 2007 release, and became far more interesting to play after the Diplomacy pack. Rebellion gets to build on this with new factions, new ships, and of course the whole rebellion theme – factions will be splinter off the main factions to create “rebel” and “loyalist” sub-factions, which in turn makes the conflict all the more hectic. With that and some AI improvements, well, we’ll be looking forward to it. Still no release date for Rebellion, but apparently it will be digital download only. Convenient for some, as Sins is now on Steam.
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30 Comments

I’m very glad to know it still exists too. I was just on wikipedia less than 3 weeks ago chasing down any leads on it to scratch The Itch.

I sure hope they change the music though. Through Entrenchment and Diplomacy, I’ve heard the faction music so much for TEC that I resorted to silencing it in favor of a Galactica / Dune / Halo playlist to keep my sanity.

I’ll probably buy it, but it saddens me knowing that it’s only an expansion (cosmetics and content, not that many fixes).
I would’ve loved to see shields reacting to damage and structure turrets rotating, as well as Group Jump actually working but sadly that’s not going to happen (at least with Rebellion).
On the + side, good to know the Distant Stars mod will be made to support it.

Yeah, serioulsy. That’s what they said in the Beta for Sins, at a time when it had already been years and years and years ago that Homeworld 1 had done animated turrets with computers far less powerful.

I guess that depends on the player, once battle is joined I frequently zoom in all the way…flying around a huge battle and seeing it all from the perspective of a single bomber is quite exciting..and pretty!

I haven’t played sins since it’s first inception. Kinda enjoyed it. Would have enjoyed a single player campaign on account of my 70+ hour working week kinda hindering social contact for prolonged periods of time (it’s not just a name). Did any of these expansions ever include one?

No, Sins continues to be strangely ambivalent to creating a single player campaign. I think they want the player to imagine their own contexts and ethos for their battles rather than bothering with such annoying things as characters, plot twists or literary prowess… beyond what’s told in the intro movies anyway.

The first expansion, Entrenchment, basically just allowed your foe to turtle behind minefields which you needed a Detector unit to see and heavily shielded and upgradable battlestations. It provided alternative defensive options for important systems other than keeping a fleet nearby but it essentially draws out a game as you then had to be prudent in how you jump to a system with a minefield, as well as extending the length of a fight for a system if it had a battlestation that invested in heavy shielding and weaponry. It did offer interesting tactical situations though when you could use a battlestation to essentially exert damage zones in system bottlenecks – like near a wormhole.

The second expansion, Diplomacy, essentially allowed a player to increase their reputation and likeability with opposing factions to their mutual benefit. Hostile A gives you a mission to destroy Hostile B ships, and you earn favor with them once you do it. Now they become Neutral A and you’d send a diplomatic envoy which would hover over their planet and provide it benefits for an additional drip-feed of favor. Doing it for long enough on enough planets eventually leads to alliances and sharing of technologies that “overclock” the military or economic capabilities for both parties. As you can imagine, this relationship juggling for unlocks injects new dynamics to your border defense and who you double-cross and when.

It’s all good fun if tedious once you master it, so you should check them out, but no campaign as of yet.

Sins operates under the misapprehension that it’s a 4X game, and therefore doesn’t need a campaign any more than Civ or MOO needed one. That it lacks anything remotely resembling the depth of those games seems to have been lost on the developers. I’d rather they went the “depthy” route than the “story driven linear campaign” route though, myself, as I’ve never had any use for the latter.

Maybe my grasp of 3D games programming is a bit lacking but can modern graphics cards do matte colours?

Every time I see shiney space ships I want to dirty them up a bit. One thing that the WIng Commander film did which I loved was make These are warships and they don’t look fresh out of the bubble wrap for long.

The new shots actually look worse.
It looks like what developers were doing when they first got Unreal Engine 3 to play with, and turned everything on the shaders up to 11 so they’d be overly noticeable. While things look a lot better when they’re subtle and discreet like in BF3.

Mass Effect 1 looked better than Mass Effect 2, which is odd. ME2 threw in so much post processing, bloom, and shininess.

Read my large post above, decide if you want to get them, and then buy Trinity off Steam in 4 weeks on the last day of the Steam Christmas sale… or earlier if they go on “Super Sale”, to quote a friend’s phrase, before the final day.